FISA Section 702 Renewal Hated by Both the Left and Right

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the feds to spy on Americans – more on that in a later post – but there are rules regarding the spying on Americans. Most of the time the FBI and others follow these rules, but not always.

The Act was passed after 9/11 but it has a sunset clause that requires it to be renewed every five years. Different sections of the act renew in different years because they were passed or updated after the initial law was passed.

Congress did this because they didn’t trust the government with the ability to indiscriminately hoover up mega boatloads of data, including that of American citizens.

In **THEORY** the data of Americans should only be looked at if an American is believed to be acting in concert with a foreign terrorist, but both the left and the right have their own reasons why they don’t believe that.

Even the very secret FISA Court has admonished the government for abusing and misusing FISA warrants and have even gone so far as to chastise the FBI for lying to the court.

The FBI/CIA/NSA want a “clean” renewal of the law. That, according to many people, stands about as much of a chance of happening as a snowball has in persisting in hell.

The real question is what will happen.

Congress has allowed other sections of FISA to expire before, much to some people’s thrill and others dismay.

There are really only two options here.

Option 1 is to let it expire and not renew it at all. If Congress acts as its normal dysfunctional self, that will occur at midnight on December 31, 2023.

Option 2 is to renew it in some form or fashion, to put more controls in place – either superficial or meaningful – and let it go forward for another few years.

Those are really the only two options.

The FBI has been pushing – hard – for Congress to renew it. They say that sometimes people on domestic soil get caught up in a sweep – say if they are working with a Chinese spy.

The FBI, conveniently, forgot to say that they, by their own admission, abused or misused Section 702 over 278,000 times from 2020 to early 2021 to conduct (likely illegal) warrantless searches on protesters, January 6 rioters, donors to Congressional campaigns and others.

But, the FBI says, that is all in the past and now they are good little boys and girls.

While it is likely that the majority of FBI agents want to follow the law, it would be very kind to say that this is not what always happened in the past. Given the secrecy of the process and the pressure to catch all forms of bad actors, we really don’t know. And people looking at databases so big that they have to build whole new data centers just to hold the data – well, what could possibly go wrong?

I suspect it will be renewed, but that is not a given. I also doubt will be renewed without another sunset. Given abuses in the past, that is highly unlikely to happen. Because neither the left or the right trust the government.

Stay tuned. How this particular sausage is made will be very interesting.

Credit: The Register

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